This is one of my manymanymany pet peeves I have regarding banks.. they do a super clever job of hiding some of the fees where they make a lot of money. In the case of foreign exchange for example, they simply just have their "rate" and usually "charge no fees". They don't explain that there's an actual true realtime global rate (www.xe.com) and that their rate has a buffer of +2.5% except for in fineprint somewhere. In fact, I've actually been to a branch before where the teller wasn't even aware of this, and I had to explain to them how they take their "fees" even though there's no labelled fee. But yah.. it just upsets me because I bet 90%+ of people that do foreign exchange transfers at banks have no idea how much they're paying as a fee vs. the true rate.. and the banks do a very good job of keeping it that way.

to think they don't print in a spot like so is super naive, that being said, its ******ed and unethical.

Sup guys,

Me and my old roommates from last year's wsop are all pretty good at basketball. And with the NBA playoffs going on, I know I certainly want to get out and play as much as possible. I'll be out there from may 27-June 3/4 .. and I'm just posting this here to see if there are any (good+ , like seriously please only reply if you are good) bballers out there that would be interested in 2-2, 3-3, 4-4 .. possibly for money during the first week of the series. PM me if so, thanks.

just got linked to this https://transferwise.com/en/about. havent used it yet, but looks like it might be a good way to transfer foreign currency- a flat 0.5% fee.

damn that looks good. thx.

I used tw last year coming and couldn't recommend it enough. Looks like they also added US>other currencies which they didn't have a license to do before.

Signup for $200 world cup random pool, last day to sign up

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...65/index5.html

For what it's worth banks seem to give better rates the more you exchange. On a 6-figure transfer a couple years ago I paid 0.60% at Are Bee See. For an amount like $10k you are definitely paying ~2.5% or so. I tried to explain how they were incentivizing me to take more money out of their bank but they either couldn't do anything or didn't care.

This is spot on. "No fees", but completely uncompetitive rate.

yeah banks suck. that is a reason why bitcoin is good. there is no point in even having your money in the banking system to gain interest or invest. interest can't keep up with inflation, and the markets are rigged.

https://imgur.com/a/BiqCM Nasa's conceptual work for living in space from the 70s, pretty cool

http://www.dancingastronaut.com/2014...seeya-preview/

new single from Deadmau5 -- pretty sweet

I feel like this might be a stupid question but if so, I'll hopefully get a good answer I'm considering buying a house and have always thought that a downside of it is that I would have to then take the money I spend on it out of my poker bankroll and sell more action when I play higher stakes which costs me EV. I said that to someone today and they asked me why I had to do that since I still have the value of the asset and could take out a loan against it at a later date if necessary in a worst case scenario. This is assuming that I'm spending a maximum of 20-25% of my net worth on a house.

A couple of things to consider are that:

1) Losing 75-80% of my bankroll is something that would be pretty disastrous anyway and I would be very much trying to avoid that by moving down and selling a lot of action before that point regardless of whether or not I have bought a house.

2) Given how rarely 200/400+ runs, it would have to be a pretty sick bad run to lose that much of my roll.

I can clearly see that it's a terrible idea to spend 90% of your net worth on a house and then continue to play the same stakes since you will very likely run into problems. Is it the case however, that if I am assuming that I am never going to continue playing while losing to the point where I run my bankroll down to nothing, that I can count some (or even all?) of the value of the house as part of my poker bankroll when it is my only non-liquid investment and only accounts for 20-25% of my roll?

It feels like it's perhaps a stupid question since my bankroll rules are so arbitrary anyway, the answer might just be "whatever I feel comfortable with" but is there anything that I'm missing that makes things much more clear cut than I have realised?

Thanks.

I assume you're buying in England? I feel like it's a fish play to just buy a house in full and not take advantage of super low mortgage rates that are extremely beatable even at pretty low risk.. unless for some reason you think the equity in the house has a ton of value (which is possible).

There's also a ton of other stuff that's pretty important to consider when buying a property. Whenever I've run the numbers in Toronto, I usually get a threshold of somewhere around 4-5 years commitment of ownership (assuming average appreciation and rates etc) where owning > renting.

I think your questions about bankroll are entirely subjective and depend on personal taste (as you said). Personally, I ditched the "bankroll" concept a long time ago.

Thanks for the reply, yeah buying in England. I was assuming that as a poker player I wouldn't be able to get super low mortgage rates but I guess I should look into it at least. Also, any investment would have to be take pretty much no effort and when I have briefly looked in the past, the returns on those seem to be pretty low as well. Not sure if I'm just looking in the wrong places or if the mortgage rates are just more beatable for you in Toronto (probably the former).

Going to state the obvious since you didn't mention it, if you lose an amount where you need the house money in your roll, and you are still having trouble getting a decently low interest mortgage. You can always sell the place.

Yeah it's easy to think that if you buy a house it would be really stupid to lose enough so that you would have to sell it. No more stupid than losing the same amount when you haven't bought a house though really (other than not having to go through the hassle of buying/selling).

Try to get in contact with a good mortgage broker. They have access to dozens+ of banks/creditors that range from the big banks down to very small companies that are often willing to take on more risk (like a poker player). Also, they very frequently will "know the right people" and be able to pull some strings.. you just may not get the best rate. (At least that's how it works in Canada.)

It's a bit more complicated in the EU since 2008. I don't know exactly how it works in England, but you need both an underlying asset and a good, stable cash flow for paying off the loan. The second part of this is not that important in North America, and might lead people to make you believe that taking a loan off the house is easier than it actually is. I'm not the guy you should ask though.

ty guys, gonna speak to someone about mortgage rates and potential rates of return for passive investments. I feel like you usually just get told the rates of return over the last small number of years from "top performing funds" when you ask about investments which is obv a massive over-estimate of what you are actually likely to get since there are just a ton of funds and the top performing ones are the ones that ran the best. Hopefully I'll get some useful info though.

You will be able to get a really good mortgage deal at the minute, however, they will ask you for a higher deposit than someone with a salary.

yeah when I put down 40%, they had no qualms about giving a good rate to a poker professional

Why are you buying a house? I understand buying a house is an easy investment choice relative to everything else but there are situations where it might not be right for you. Write down a pros and cons list for tying such a massive amount of your net worth to a single asset that isn't movable.

Also, you should highly get a mortgage. Interest rate is all-time low (at least in the US). Since poker is regulated in the UK, I assume it won't be that difficult for you to get a loan. If you're worried about bad interest rate since you're a poker player, maybe you can re-finance after a few years of payment. I think an extra point or two in vig is the least of your worry at the moment.

Lastly, I'm highly against taking a collateral against your house for poker bankroll purposes. It's already stressful enough you're busting your roll. You don't want to have your home reminding you that you need to win right now. If you somehow find yourself in that spot, take a long break, and ask for a stake. I'm sure there are tons of players who's willing to bankroll you.

Good luck.

Wait a sec. Why would you ever want a mortgage when you can finance the house fully in cash? Yes, interest rates are at an all time low but so are the interest rates on your savings/low risk investments. You should run some basic excel calcs on how much you will pay in interest over the lets say 25 years your mortgage runs. When my girlfriend looked into getting a mortgage for €164k, it showed that after 25 years she'd have paid 59k in interest.

Why would you ever want to pay money to a bank when you don't have to.

I think it's about opportunity cost.

Lets say Kanu wants to buy a house for £300k and he works out that over 25 years with a mortgage he will pay back £400k

So in theory if he just buys cash he saves £100k

However if he got the mortgage and put his £300k cash into some low risk funds with compound interest for 25 years he might have £500k.

For an overall profit of £100k.

Thats my limited understanding of this anyway and i could be wrong.

this!

additionally in many countries it has tax benefits when you take up a mortgage instead of paying it all in cash.
Not sure if that is relevant for Kanu though, because he probably isn´t paying many taxes anyway with the current gaming regulations in the UK.